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Dessert

Bisque Ice Cream

A chilled dessert made with cream, macaroons, lady fingers, sugar, kisses, vanilla, caramel, sherry, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Bisque Ice Cream

Why it works: Vanilla and sherry work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 506 recipes. Both carry piperonal, which smells bitter, coconut. The science ↓

Bisque Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cake crumbs

  1. Pound the macaroons, kisses, and lady fingers through a colander.

Make the custard base

  1. Boil 1 pint of cream in a double boiler, then stir in the sugar until boiling hot.

  2. Remove from heat, add the remaining cream, and let it cool.

  3. Pour the mixture into an ice cream maker and freeze.

Finish and ripen

  1. Once frozen, add the vanilla, caramel, and pounded cakes, and sherry if using.

  2. Beat the mixture until perfectly smooth.

  3. Drain water from the ice cream maker, add more salt and ice, remove the dasher, cover, and let stand for 3 to 4 hours to ripen.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Vanilla + sherrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Cream + vanillatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Cream + sherrytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cream
Provides fat and richness, giving the ice cream a smooth, creamy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice cream softer.
Macaroons
Add flavour and body from the crumbs, adding almond-like aroma and texture.
Lady fingers
Soak up moisture and add sponge-like body and flavour to the ice cream.
Kisses
Add sweetness, flavour and body as pounded crumbs.

The step that matters

Beat the mixture until perfectly smooth. Breaking up ice crystals while the mixture is still partly frozen keeps the texture smooth rather than grainy or icy.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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